The Collectors of Lost Souls

Turning Kuru Scientists Into Whitemen
2. Updated Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4214-3360-8
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 352 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 218 mm, Gewicht: 476 g

This riveting account of medical detective work traces the story of kuru, a fatal brain disease, and the pioneering scientists who spent decades searching for its cause and cure.

Winner, William H. Welch Medal, American Association for the History of Medicine
Winner, Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science
Winner, General History Award, New South Wales Premier's History Awards

When whites first encountered the Fore people in the isolated highlands of colonial New Guinea during the 1940s and 1950s, they found a people in the grip of a bizarre epidemic. Women and children succumbed to muscle weakness, uncontrollable tremors, and lack of coordination, until death inevitably supervened. Facing extinction, the Fore attributed their unique and terrifying affliction to a particularly malign form of sorcery.

In The Collectors of Lost Souls, Warwick Anderson tells the story of the resilience of the Fore through this devastating plague, their transformation into modern people, and their compelling attraction for a throng of eccentric and adventurous scientists and anthropologists. Battling competing scientists and the colonial authorities, the brilliant and troubled American doctor D. Carleton Gajdusek determined that the cause of the epidemic—kuru—was a new and mysterious agent of infection, which he called a slow virus (now called a prion). Anthropologists and epidemiologists soon realized that the Fore practice of eating their loved ones after death had spread the slow virus. Though the Fore were never convinced, Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for his discovery.

Now revised and updated, the book includes an extensive new afterword that situates its impact within the fields of science and technology studies and the history of science. Additionally, the author now reflects on his long engagement with the scientists and the people afflicted, describing what has happened to them since the end of kuru. This astonishing story links first-contact encounters in New Guinea with laboratory experiments in Bethesda, Maryland; sorcery with science; cannibalism with compassion; and slow viruses with infectious proteins, reshaping our understanding of what it means to do science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Anderson, Warwick

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface to the Updated Edition
Introduction. The Disease Europeans Catch from Kuru
Chapter 1. Stranger Relations
Chapter 2. Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Man
Chapter 3. A Contemptuous Tenderness
Chapter 4. The Scientist and His Magic
Chapter 5. Hearts of Darkness
Chapter 6. Specimen Days
Chapter 7. We Were Their People
Chapter 8. Stumbling along the Tortuous Road
Conclusion. Dénouement Was a Bit Difficult
Afterword
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Anderson, Warwick
Warwick Anderson is an Australian Research Council laureate fellow and a professor in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, also published by Johns Hopkins.

For almost thirty years Warwick Anderson, medical doctor and historian of science, has been studying kuru, those who were affected by the disease, and the scientists who identified and investigated it. Based at the University of Sydney, he is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Department of History. He is the author of Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines and the coauthor of Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity.